colby's mum. seriously.

The Photography Reader
Roland Barthes – Chapter 1


Feeling ‘scientifically’ alone and disarmed, the thing that makes me pause when looking at this photograph and appeals to my tastes (or so-called studium) is the raw mechanistic elements that are incorporated. The punctured numbers (not in my case the punctum but something more aesthetically pleasing), the film holes, the upside down text, and the scorched feeling to the edge of the photograph all evoke the same feelings that are stirred when I hear clicking, breaking, metallic, mechanical sounds. A good feeling, and one that inspires to think more physically about a picture, not detached with emotions that are conjured when one looks too closely at the subject of a photograph.

On that note, the expression on the mother’s face takes the viewer far from the clicking of a camera shutter. This, for me, represents the pricking punctum that can pop up in a photograph from time to time. Her gaze snatches you into pretending that you can possibly imagine where she is looking or what she is thinking. I shake myself out of that moonshine, and wonder away. Back to what pleases me visually. That which I can't describe. What I want to learn.